How to Protect Your Systems From Flooding

How to Protect Your Systems From Flooding

With hurricane Isaac headed toward the Gulf Coast this week, many businesses are wondering what they can do to protect their computer systems. We at Vroooom have a few tips that might help save some vital equipment.

Preventive steps

The step a business or a person can take is to prevent a total loss of data by backing up the data to an off-site location. This is a cost-effective method of protecting your important data and is vital if you live in area prone to natural disasters.

In the case of a hurricane, the disaster is far-reaching and effects whole states are regions of the United States. Since any backup systems located close to these areas can be possibly damaged, make sure to keep the systems in areas that will not be affected by the same natural disaster.

Disaster recovery

As soon as you are able to return, you may need to restore data or fail over data systems to another location if the damage is severe. This should be judged based on the priority of the data in question and how you can go without access to it.

Since many employees, and possibly yourself, may be evacuated, this may give you more time to restore operations. Once you have found where you will restore to, a step that should be planned ahead in case of emergency, you can purchase the required hardware, set up the systems and restore the data.

Hopefully, you will have secondary systems ready at another location, or have the necessary hardware ready to ship to the work site.

If for some reason these plans don’t work, there are also professional data recovery services available that specialize in restoring data from damaged hard drives, even those exposed to floods and fire.

Putting it all back together

After recovering the information, you will need to determine how you will restore your information after future hurricanes. Floods and water damage often leave behind the basic infrastructure after the water recedes. It is entirely possible you can return to the old office, barring any significant damage, and put equipment back together again. Most equipment will be lost, but you may be able to salvage some equipment that didn’t get soaked.

Next you will need to decide if you want to replace the damaged equipment with new supplies, or if you would prefer to move in some secondary equipment from another location. A decision will also have to be made about where to rebuild if needed.

Once a plan has been put place, the new data systems should be up and running with as little down time as possible.

Hurricanes come and go for residents on the Gulf Coast and leave destruction

Flood waters come and go, and leave devastation and destruction in their wake. Preparation and backup are your two greatest weapons to battle back against a rising tide.